The world seemed to have come to a standstill for about half-an-hour on Thursday.

Facebook was shut down for a few minutes sending users into frenzy. The incident, however, triggered a surge of jokes and memes in Twitter.Facebook Screenshot

The world seemed to have come to a standstill for about half-an-hour on Thursday - thanks to a never-before-seen and sudden shut down of Facebook.

Users went berserk on what happened at around 4 am ET (just after midday in India) as access to Facebook and its apps went down, leaving millions of users wondering what had happened.

For about a good half-an-hour, users who tried to access the most popular social networking site in countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland, Israel and India received the following message: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can,"

Problems with the site were also reported across multiple other nations in Asia and the Middle East.

And within minutes, the hastags #WhenFacebookWasDown and #facebookdown were seen trending on rival site Twitter globally.

"We experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time," the company told NBC News. "We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%."

The social network giant has, however, refused to specify how many users were affected or explain what exactly caused the problem.

Mark Zuckerberg has been, in the past, widely quoted, saying Facebook would never crash. Considered the most popular website, competing directly with Google for Alexa's number one ranking, the social networking site has nearly 1.28 billion users across the world, with more than 80 percent of it understood to be outside the North American continent.

The last time a major issue hit Facebook was in 2010, when a server error led to the site being shut down for about two-and-a-half hours.

The Guardian reported that its traffic dramatically dropped as the site shut down (as Facebook's referral to the site also went down) across the globe - a trend all major news websites would have suffered on Thursday.

Meanwhile, it is worth looking at some of the funny tweets the Facebook shut down triggered on rival site Twitter: